Monday, September 29th, 2014

Sunday afternoon was the first time in a long while I have not been able to watch a Buffalo Bills game live. Sitting at an outdoor wedding reception for a friend, phone on lap and scrolling for occasional game updates isn’t the most ideal way to keep track, but nonetheless gets the job done in the short term.

I began to make the three-ish hour trip back to my home in the Boston area right after Manuel’s 80-yard touchdown pass to Mike Williams, with the hope that the Bills would find a way to pull out a seemingly sloppy contest in Houston. A short 30 minutes later, stuck on I-84 in Connecticut, the bad news trickled out of the local ESPN Radio syndicate that a late EJ Manuel interception sealed a six-point win for the Texans.

Losses against teams the Bills should be able to beat are always tough to take and the two-hour stewing over the remainder of the car ride was full of angry thoughts regarding the status of the offense.

When I flipped on NFL Game Rewind on Monday morning, my expectation was to have my reactions to ESPN Gamecast be affirmed by bad throws and missed plays. My Twitter feed was full of EJ Manuel-related angst—mine included—and typical bad-loss hot takes only generated by fans of a beleaguered franchise. My expectation was to see an absolute mess of a game, but the mistakes weren’t aren’t as unfixable as the angry sports fanatic in me wanted to believe.

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

Fans of a football team tend to give the quarterback too much credit when the team wins and heap excessive blame on the signal-caller when the team loses. That’s especially been the case for the Buffalo Bills and their fanbase, understandably so, in the one season and four games of the EJ Manuel era thus far.

I’m not going to join the fanbase in its cries for Kyle Orton to the Buffalo Bills’ starting quarterback, and even in Sunday’s 23-17 loss to the Houston Texans, a loss that was sealed when Manuel threw an interception into double coverage, I don’t think Manuel deserves all the blame for the struggles of Buffalo’s offense.

That said, Manuel didn’t make himself easy to defend with his poor performance Sunday.

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

The Buffalo Bills tried to stage a late comeback after blowing a first-half lead, but it came up short when EJ Manuel threw an interception into double coverage on Buffalo’s final offensive possession. The takeaway by Houston Texans cornerback Darryl Morris clinched a victory, 23-17, for the home team at NRG Stadium.

After trading out of the top 10 in last year’s NFL draft, the Buffalo Bills might be looking to move up this year.

At least that’s what longtime NFL reporter Dan Pompei is hearing. In this week’s “Read Option” column for Bleacher Report, Pompei wrote that the Houston Texans are “trying hard to deal the first pick in the draft,” and that “they might have a trade partner in the Bills, who appear interested in moving up.”